


Never Run When You're Scared

by mountain_born



Series: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin [7]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Doctor Who/Avengers Crossover Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 13:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_born/pseuds/mountain_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's River Song's first anniversary with SHIELD, one year since Clint Barton and Phil Coulson found her in Bulgaria and brought her in.  It's something of a milestone for someone who spent so many years on her own.  So Clint isn't altogether surprised when he finds his partner about to go on the run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Run When You're Scared

**Author's Note:**

> Once more, I must shout out the kudos to **like_a_raven** for her betaing skills. This series would be considerably poorer without her input.
> 
> In a few weeks I hope to be set to launch my first multi-chapter case fic in this 'verse, and start to get into the meat of AU River's history and background.

_September 2006_

 

The day River finally tried to run, Clint found her at Grand Central Station.

As far as escape and evasion plans went, she wasn’t putting much effort into it, Clint thought. River had just gotten back to work after a four-day stretch of R&R time. She could have run at any time during those four days, could have had a ninety-six hour head start before they even knew she was gone. Instead she had disappeared on a day she was due on base, when Clint and Coulson couldn’t help but notice she was gone.

Clint didn’t even have to go hunting through the station’s shops or on the platforms. He found River in the main concourse, sitting cross-legged in an out-of-the-way spot on the floor along the wall. Her backpack was beside her. There was an open book resting in her lap. Even from a distance, Clint could tell that she wasn’t actually reading it.

Clint stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket and watched her for a few minutes. To be honest, he had been half-expecting something like this. It had been a year, almost exactly, since they’d brought River into SHIELD. It was the sort of time you stopped to evaluate. Or, if you were River, reevaluate yet again. 

River had been off probation since March. She acted like she’d lived on the SHIELD base her whole life, and Clint knew she’d found a place somewhere in the city as well. They had been officially working together for six months, and working well. 

Their team—Coulson, Clint, and River—had already started to generate some buzz within SHIELD. Three weeks ago they had pulled off an intel assignment in Italy that even Fury had expressed doubts about the feasibility of. During their downtime, Coulson and River had wound up striking a bet as to whether she could locate and identify the four tattoos the senior agent had on his person (a bet that had kept Clint highly entertained). After the mission they had hit a _ristorante_ to celebrate before their extraction, Coulson had somehow gotten himself kissed by the waitress, and River and Clint had both laughed like lunatics while he had tried to get red lipstick off of his face. 

Even Coulson getting clipped by a dumb teenage kid on a scooter on the walk back to the safe house hadn’t been enough to dampen the mood for long.

It had been a really good week.

So, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that they were here now, Clint thought. It was always _one step forward, three steps back_ with River. She’d forget to keep her distance, actually let herself openly enjoy their company, and then it was like she’d catch herself and pull back again. It had happened before over the past year, but never to this extreme.

She’d never packed a bag before. At least not that he was aware of.

River didn’t look up or move when Clint sat down on the floor beside her.

“I’ve always liked this station,” he said after a few minutes of silence. “Don’t have a reason to come here much. The trains don’t go much of any place ever since Amtrak moved down to Penn. But I like it. It’s a good place to watch people.”

River didn’t answer. She didn’t give much of any sign that she knew Clint was there at all. Clint leaned his head back against the wall, looking at the painted constellations high overhead. 

“You know,” he said, “I heard that before they did all the restorations, you couldn’t even see that. They thought it was smoked over, and it was. But it was from cigarette smoke. Can you believe that?”

River’s only response was to tuck her chin in a little more tightly. 

“So, when does your train leave?” he asked.

River idly rubbed her thumb along the pages of her book. “Eleven thirty,” she said without looking up.

Clint cast an unnecessary look at the clock over the information booth. It was a quarter to three.

“I think you missed it,” he said.

River just nodded.

“Why didn’t you get on it?” he asked. When an answer didn’t seem to be forthcoming, Clint shifted slightly so that his shoulder rested against hers. He took it as an encouraging sign when she didn’t move away from him. “What’s going on, River? Why are you taking off? I thought things were going okay.”

River tipped her head back against the wall. “They are.” Her voice sounded suspiciously thick. “That’s why.”

Clint counted twenty-three people pass them by while he waited for her to go on. No one paid any attention to them. They were all either seeing the sights or running to catch their trains. 

“I’m not…” River’s voice caught and she looked down again. “I’m not good at belonging to things.”

“Yeah. Neither was I before SHIELD. ”

She had gone back to worrying at the pages of her book. “The Army, you mean?”

River knew the basics of his life story. She knew that he’d been orphaned young. She knew that he had run off with the circus at thirteen and that that was where he’d learned to fire a bow. (River had met that story with some skepticism even after Coulson had confirmed it.) She knew that he’d left the circus for the Army where he’d managed to land himself into trouble and had been in prison awaiting court-martial when Coulson had turned up to recruit him.

The last part in particular he had made sure River knew about. He’d thought it was important that she know who she was working with.

“The Army,” Clint confirmed with a nod. “And Carson’s Carnival before that. And before that, eight foster homes.” He shook his head slightly. “I guess you could say the attitude problem didn’t start in the Army.”

River turned her head toward him slightly, still not looking at him.

“You were seven. How much of an ‘attitude problem’ could you possibly have had?”

“Different sort of problem, I guess. I was a traumatized little kid who acted up and cried all the time and tried to hit anyone who tried to help. It had to have been hard to take.” Clint stretched out his legs, crossing his ankles. “My parents were killed in a car accident. My brother, Barney, and I were in the backseat when it happened. We were pretty messed up.”

River’s thumb had stopped moving against the pages. “You have a brother?” she asked. 

“Have. Had.” Clint shrugged a little. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

Clint didn’t even know if Barney was alive or dead. Probably alive. If Barney was dead, he was pretty sure Coulson would have told him. Like they kept telling River, details from the past could constitute security risks, so Clint was sure that his handler had made it his business to find and keep tabs on Barney. But Clint had no interest in dredging up that part of his past.

“But yeah,” he continued. “Barney. My big brother. He’s about four years older than me. And you want to talk about attitude problems.” Clint laughed a little and shook his head. “Not to mention a bad influence as time went on. About the only thing worse than keeping us together was threatening to separate us. That was why we ran off with the Carnival.”

And in the end, Barney had abandoned him, too. 

“We probably scared off a few decent families,” Clint said. “Of course, some of them were just miserable. Some foster parents aren’t fit to take care of houseplants, let alone kids.”

River nodded silently. “Mine were good,” she said after a moment.

Clint looked down at her. Some of her hair had come loose from its clip and it half-curtained her face. She looked up just for a second, though, catching his eye for the first time since he’d arrived.

“I know what you think,” she said. “I’ve seen your face when it comes up. You think they did horrible things to me to make me turn out the way I did. They didn’t though. They really were good people. I’m not sure what they’d make of what I am now.”

“So, what happened to them?” Clint asked.

River swallowed hard and dropped her eyes again. “They’ve been dead a long time.”

Clint nodded. “What about your birth parents?” he ventured. “Amelia and Rory. Have you ever thought about contacting them?”

River shook her head even before he’d finished the question. “No. They wouldn’t recognize me if they ever saw me. So…” She cleared her throat. “Why the Army?” 

The sharp left turn didn’t throw him. Clint would have been shocked if she’d said any more about her family. He was surprised that she’d said as much as she had.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time?” he said, going along with the change in subject. “I don’t know. I was seventeen. I felt like I couldn’t stay with Carson’s anymore. I was a middle school drop-out, which is one of those things that kind of limits your options. So, I fudged my age by a handful of months, invented a high school diploma and enlisted. I wasn’t half bad at being a soldier, either.”

River had closed her book, flexing her hands along its spine. “But you were going to be court-martialed.”

“Yeah. I was better at some parts of the life than others. Great with a rifle. Good at being part of a unit. Not so good at following what I thought were crap orders. My CO and I didn’t exactly get along. I kept getting my ass in trouble for insubordination. Then I took off with a buddy one weekend when I didn’t have leave and that got me tossed into a cell for desertion. Once they started doing a little digging they found out that my paperwork was falsified pretty damn fast. That just added another layer of shit to a bad situation.”

“How did Coulson find you?” River asked.

“My lawyer was an old college friend of his. He didn’t think he had a hope in hell of getting me off on the charges, but I guess he thought SHIELD might be able to use me. He called Phil. Phil came out to talk to me. He offered me a job and I’ve been here ever since.”

“And it was that easy?” River said. Her voice had gone rather brittle.

“Hell, no,” Clint replied readily. “I put Phil through the wringer for the first few months. I figured that SHIELD would turn around and bite me in the ass the way every other place I’d landed had. I figured Phil would wind up being one more person I couldn’t count on. But that didn’t happen. Turns out this was the luckiest break I’ve ever caught in my life. I think some people just belong with SHIELD. I think you could be one of them if you let yourself.”

“I don’t know if I can. I…” Clint saw River’s hands tighten into fists. She started talking fast, like she was trying to keep ahead of the impulse to shut up. “It always winds up going to hell. You get to feel at home in a place, you have to leave it. You care about people, you lose them. You believe in things and you find out they’re lies. What’s the point of even opening the door?”

Clint frowned. “At the risk of sounding patronizing, River, you’re nineteen. You’re a little young to give up on the whole world.”

She looked back up at him with one of the sorriest excuses for a smile he’d ever seen. “What would you say if I told you I’m older on the inside?” she said.

“I’d say that I get it.” That just seemed to be a product of the sort of life they’d landed in. “Look, I know we didn’t give you a real choice about being here,” Clint said. “I kind of wish that that could be different, but it is what it is.” 

SHIELD had been his alternative to a court-martial, a stint in military prison, a bad conduct discharge, and no future. River had basically had the option of joining up or being killed. Neither one was exactly the thing of which an inspiring recruitment video was made.

“But no matter how we got here, it’s not really a bad thing, is it? I mean, the way you’re talking, the thing that’s sending you running is that you like it here. I get that, too. It’s really fucking scary when you realize that you have something to lose again.” 

He pretended not to notice the way River hooked her thumb into the cuff of her shirt sleeve and rubbed at her eyes.

“Do you really want to leave?” he asked.

He only had to count five passers-by before River answered him.

“I don’t know,” she said. She leaned her head back again and looked at the stars on the ceiling with eyes that had gone rather red. She stretched her legs out in front of her and they just sat there for a while, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. “How pissed is Coulson going to be when you bring me back?” she asked.

Clint shrugged. “He won’t be any more pissed than he was the time I did this.”

That got her attention. 

“You? _You_ ran from SHIELD?”

“Seven months in.” Clint nodded. “I made it all the way to New Haven.”

“What happened?”

“Phil turned up after a few hours and found me at the station. We sat and talked for a little while. Then he picked up my bag, bought us a couple of tickets back to New York, and we went home.”

It had made Clint feel seven years old all over again, but in a way that had actually been comforting. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud.

“Anyway,” he said, “you’re forgetting the most compelling reason to come back.” He raised his eyebrows seriously when River looked over at him. “Shepherd’s pie in the mess hall tonight.”

River boggled at him for a moment before he allowed a grin to show. She sputtered for a second, then started laughing.

“What? It’s weird British food. It’s right up your alley.”

River wiped again at her eyes, which had begun to stream freely. “That stuff isn’t shepherd’s pie. It’s beef stew with a scoop of mashed potatoes in the middle.”

“Exactly.” Clint leaned against her for a second in an armless version of a hug before pushing himself up to his feet. He picked up River’s backpack with one hand and helped her up off the floor with the other. “Come on. Let’s head back.”

River nodded. “Yeah,” she said, wincing a little as she stretched her back out. She wiped at her cheeks one more time and pinned Clint with a half-hearted glare. “If you tell Coulson I cried, I’ll kick your ass all the way across the base.”

“Deal,” Clint said, wrapping his free arm briefly around her shoulders as they headed for the stairs that would take them down to the subway.

*****

Clint stopped by Coulson’s office on his way to meet up with River at the mess hall.

“Hey. We’re back,” he said.

Coulson glanced up from his paperwork. “Did you two have a good day out?” he asked.

Clint shrugged. “Toured Grand Central,” he said.

Coulson raised his eyebrows at the implication. He was well aware, after all, that neither of his agents had been scheduled to leave the base today. 

“Is everything okay?” 

Clint nodded. “I think it will be,” he said. He pushed himself off the doorframe. “Are you meeting up with us for dinner? Shepherd’s pie tonight.”

Coulson smiled and stapled a sheaf of papers together. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

Clint turned and was heading off when he heard his handler add, “At least you didn’t have to drag your ass all the way out to Connecticut.”


End file.
